In offices around the US, the scramble is on to find an alternative to Ticketmaster.
Illustration: Ivan Minsloff
On June 3, employees of the iconic alt-rock band the Pixies gathered outside the Troxy theater in London for an experiment. Armed with five iPhones and customized barcode-scanning software, they spent two hours selling admission to nearly 3,000 fans who had learned of a surprise concert through word of mouth or email. The Pixies created the system with Topspin Media, a company that helps artists like Eminem, Metric, and OK Go market their music and wares directly to fans. “There was no surcharge, no booking fee,” says Richard Jones, the Pixies’ manager. “Thirty pounds is thirty pounds.”
Almost anyone who goes to concerts understands why this is significant. No service charge. Zero. The Pixies and Topspin had sidestepped the seemingly inevitable fees tacked onto any ticket. They had, in other words, sidestepped Ticketmaster, the juggernaut that sells more than 130 million tickets a year for everything from Lady Gaga shows to monster-truck rallies.
Started as an experiment, Ticketmaster has since developed a near lock on the multibillion-dollar ticketing industry. And the company is only getting bigger. Last winter it merged with Live Nation, the largest concert promoter in the country, which means that in effect Ticketmaster now also controls access to acts like U2 and Jay-Z and owns many of the amphitheaters in the US, including the Irvine Meadows/Verizon Amphitheater in California and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York.
Among fans and artists, of course, Ticketmaster is widely despised. It extracts high service fees (known commonly as “those goddamned Ticketmaster service fees”) but has offered very little innovation in ticketing over the past 30 years. The Pixies, for example, added thousands of names, complete with contact info, to their marketing database thanks to the Troxy gig—something they can’t generally get when they sell tickets through Ticketmaster. And now, in the wake of the Live Nation merger, many in the concert industry are worried that Ticketmaster might be more interested in promoting its own artists and venues than in selling tickets for rival acts.
